


Bizarre Love Triangle

by Cephied_Variable



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Asphyxiation, Consent Issues, M/M, MGSV:TPP - Major Spoilers, War Crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 07:06:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5082343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephied_Variable/pseuds/Cephied_Variable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Legend, the Phantom, and <i>you</i>. What kind of shitty love triangle only involves two people anyway?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. (THE PHANTOM)

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warning: Asphyxiation. Accounts of real life war crimes and human rights violations. Bad power dynamics all around, some dubious consent. Mildly problematic, period appropriate language.

**[YOU]**

The first thing Kazuhira does when the door to his office falls shut is throw his entire uneven weight into Venom Snake’s chest and pin him to the wall. He presses his cane up against Venom’s jugular and hisses: “What the fuck did he tell you about me?”

Kazuhira’s anger has had time to percolate. This is the storm after two weeks of gathering calm during which Venom received every single mission briefing from Ocelot. Twice he passed Kaz on his way to R&D and was not even dignified with _acknowledgement_. Venom likes to think that he has his own learned understanding of his X.O.’s moods by now, an understanding not whispered into his ear by their mutual Master. Slow builds, outbursts delivered in quick, calculated violence and the long dark afterward; somewhere - in the dim back of his skull - there is knowledge that Kazuhira Miller hasn’t always been like this.

Venom weighs his options. He curls a gentle hand - the real one - around the end of Kazuhira’s cane, but he does not move it back. Softly, he says: “ _Kaz…_ ”

“Don’t. Not in that tone, not in that _voice_.”

“This is my voice.”

“No, it’s _his_. Everything that you do, that comes out of your mouth, is just shit he _told_ you. So tell me - what did he tell you about me? How did he tell you to act with me? What did he tell you to _do_ with me?”

The cane vibrates beneath his palm; Kazuhira’s arm is shuddering, and not just from anger. Venom holds the metal still. “If you allowed time for your head to clear, you’d realize that there is no way for me to remember that.”

“Isn’t there? The human brain is an amazing thing. I know all about the delicate mechanics of _brainwashing_ , it’s part of this job - there is no known method to erase a human being entirely. That’s the benefit of sapience: a man can’t be programmed like an animal.” Kazuhira chuckles unkindly, “or are you admitting that you aren’t really human? That you’re just a _thing_ , a _tool_ , Big Boss’s _goddamn pet dog_ -”

Venom yanks hard on Kazuhira’s cane and sends it flying to the other end of the office. Before his false leg buckles beneath him, Venom snaps out his bionic arm and catches him by the neck. His mechanical fingers click and whirr as they tighten a half inch, constricting the trachea just enough that whatever breath came out in Kazuhira’s strangled grasp won’t be replaced. Beneath the sunglasses, Kaz’s eyes widen - shock, panic and a bright flash of _familiarity_. Venom lifts him off the ground, just a little bit, so that his toes can’t quite find purchase on the floor.

“Is this the only way to win your respect?”

Kaz stops struggling when he hears that. His arm falls limp at his side and his lips twitch around wet, guttural breaths. It takes a few seconds, but he manages to crack a smile. Venom cranks his hand two centimetres tighter and watches the colour drain from his second in command’s cheeks. This sort of thing is second nature - _instinctual_ \- to Venom, to watch for signs of oxygen deprivation, to wrench a man to sleep almost gently-

_\- no no - extracted prisoner’s eyes are bulging, the rope pulled so tight it has scraped the skin off, left the flesh above his lymph nodes all bloody. No time to cut the rope, we need to punch his windpipe open, hand me a - too late, his lips all blue, it’s too la -_

Pain shoots through Venom’s skull, like the shrapnel imbedded in his forehead is drilling right into his brain. He lets Kaz go, lets him crumple to the floor in a heap. His vision is spinning, turning into bright colours and sparks at the edges, shadows moving with purpose just beyond the scope of his peripheral. He braces himself against the wall and steadies, breathes slowly and focuses on what around him is definitely real: the Diamond Dogs flag hung behind the desk, the view of the Indian Ocean through the porthole window, the military grade cassette player sitting next to Kaz’s neatly stacked paper-work.

Kazuhira has struggled to knee and elbow, doubled over wheezing and dry heaving. His hacking turns to coughs, and then to laughter. His sunglasses clatter to the floor as he tries to fill his lungs. They land in the foamy pool of spittle and bile forming beneath him, next to his hand.

“I… I knew…” he croaks, “I _knew_ you didn’t… have the guts to… actually do it.” He whips his head up and glares at Venom, triumphant. “That’s why you’ll never really be him.”

Venom presses his eye shut for a moment. When he opens it again, the hallucinations have passed. He gazes down at Kazuhira - flushed, wounded, a string of saliva dangling from his jaw, and still somehow he manages to act like he won. His bravado is dented, but it’s not hollow.

“Is this really how you’d prefer I treat you?”

“What does your _programming_ tell you? How did you _feel_ when you did that to me, huh?”

‘Nothing’ is what Venom felt. It hadn’t felt any different from strangling any anonymous PF sentry in the wilds of Zaire. Now that it’s over, he feels dirty and empty, like he needs to take a shower and pet his dog. Like he needs to have a few beers to remind himself that he’s still human. 

“Is that how-” Venom starts to say, but thinks better of it. It’s too late, however - Kazuhira caught the implication of the question. He’s sitting up now, massaging his bruised neck. Venom has looked into Kaz’s face while Kaz has begged him to commit murder, but somehow his eyes have never been quite so hateful.

“You don’t know the first thing about our relationship,” Kaz hisses.

Venom goes to collect the cane. Kazuhira takes it without a fuss, but he smacks Venom’s hand away when he tries to help him up. When he is finally standing, Venom says: “I’m sorry, Kazuhira. I didn’t mean to presume.”

Kaz takes a minute to clean his aviators off on his jacket. With one arm, it takes twice the time it should. When his shades are back on - all his walls back up - he turns to Venom. “When we’re alone, you call me _‘Commander Miller’_. You got that?”

There are two instincts at war inside Venom: one that knows Kaz sometimes needs to be kept in line by unusual methods, and one buried in the murk, in the mists of _before_ , that takes its orders from this man. Whatever their Boss did to him, Venom suspects that inclination was very carefully and intentionally kept intact. There’s a third thing too, more a feeling that an instinct: a part of him that wants to win Kaz ( _back?_ ) on his own terms.

He replies carefully. “If that’s what you want.”

Kazuhira snorts and makes a dismissive gesture with the crutch of his cane. “Get the hell out of my office.” He doesn’t even look at Venom as he leaves. Of course - even now, the only thing he sees is Big Boss.

 

**[ME]**

_The first memory you have, the first memory you really, truly have is of looking in a mirror and seeing two reflections. After that everything is survival, trial by fire, crawling through glass, hands shuddering around the butt of the gun he hands you, your arms and fingers slick with blood that is not your own. You think - you thought - Ishmael might have been a hallucination, a phantom manifestation of your atrophied skills hovering over you like a guardian angel. He says run and you run. You know now that it wasn’t guidance, it was a leash, but Big Boss is a great man and when he tells his men to heel, that is him catching them when they fall. Whatever part of you could have harboured resentment was wrung out of you along with your old identity. The voice in your head is his now, it knows the things he knows. That voice quiets your bones, instills them with purpose. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s -_

Mostly, you are confident about the things you say and do. You feel like you are his hand - his right hand, because the left hand is always kept in darkness. You are an extension of him that breathes and moves with accurate and objective aim Your brain is like a part of his nervous system, the reptile pod to his mammal. Often, you don’t second guess or analyze your decisions. If you thought it, then he must have thought it too.

You do wonder about her, however. The girl. Long after she’s gone, you find yourself wandering the back end of the Med Bay strut, listening for the pounding back beat of american pop songs, searching for the scent of rainwater and gunpowder. 

When he starts speaking to you again, the first crime Commander Miller throws at your feet is her life. “The Boss would have killed her,” Miller swears with unwavering confidence. His faith in Big Boss is unbreakable, even when that faith is based in hatred. “He never would have brought her here and he especially wouldn’t have let her cavort around arrogantly the way she did. Even if he did, she would have stayed in her cell. He never would have allowed what you did.”

Is it true? Quiet listened to you. You never thought her arrogant - you thought her strong, and unapologetic about her strength. That’s something you understood about her - she had nothing to prove and even less to lose. It was calming to sit at her side, examining the enemy route maps as she quietly hummed and cleaned her gun. At Mother Base, Ocelot and Kaz were always subtly jockeying for approval and authority, and sometimes watching them wield their respective weapons - opportunity and anger - put pressure on your skull. There are moments where your programming falls apart, where the scripts come loose and the words begin to crumble apart letter by letter. When your lieutenants snipe at each other over game-changing decisions, you block them out and go with your gut. 

Ocelot’s argument about usefulness didn’t even register. When you stood over her gasping, bloody body, it was as if you were guided by some unseen hand to spare her life. As if the fingers puppeteering your mind eased up for a moment, crawled out from between the spaces in your grey matter and finally gave you time to breathe. In that dark, dusty silence, you eased off the trigger and saw into her soul.

You didn’t save her for Ocelot, or for Big Boss, or for Diamond Dogs - you saved her for you ( _hands in her guts, shuddering around a thing made of steel and bolts, you saved her you saved her, she_ ), because her silence matched the silence in your head. Quiet was like you - a tool so efficiently honed that she lacked human pride. 

You don’t try to argue with Miller about her, or try to remind him that he'd eaten his words about her before the end. There was no point to argue after the end when you didn’t argue with him from the start. When he still thought you were ~~the real~~ _his_ Big Boss, he read you the riot act over “siding” with Ocelot. Your response was to set your hand in the crook of his elbow and gently tug him closer. You said: “Kaz, I know what I’m doing. Trust me on this - if she steps out of line, you’ll be the first to know.” His human pride is what drives him. You’d say that he has too much of it, but you know that it’s all he has left.

Touch and intimacy worked - still works, really - to disarm his fury, to dismantle his arguments. Intimacy makes him feel included in your decisions even when you blatantly disregard him. Something as simple as pressing your shoulder against his will slowly reel him in when he begins to spin out into unreasonable demands or petty vendettas. 

It didn’t feel manipulative when you didn’t know - it felt normal. Wasn’t that how it had always been, after all? - Miller and the Boss: lighting their cigar and pipe from the same zippo, walking through the helipad with their arms pressed flush and Big Boss reading from the papers Miller was carrying, heads always together about the budget or the next mission. At the staff parties, they always remained in orbit and Miller would refill the Boss’ cup without asking, always threw one arm around him when photographs were taken, his beaming grin the natural partner to “Vic” Boss’ dour half-smile. When the Boss was on missions, Miller whirled around base doing his paper-work and X.O. check ups with a radio always hooked in one ear. He signed off on requisition forms and read through personnel complaints all the while supporting his partner from the other corner of his mouth.

_Sometimes you saw him wandering the edge of camp, or the upper levels of Mother Base’s R &D Platform, with one hand cupped over his free ear and one arm braced on a tree, or slung over the railing. Days like that, everyone knew that something went wrong. Haven’t seen Commander Miller for a few hours - Boss must be hurt._

_(You, you, how did you see that if you were out on- if you were the one getting hurt? Sometimes you can almost see what the sky looked like from behind two eyes, you can almost see your old hands -)_

\- he’s still like this, you can hear when he’s biting the inside of his mouth over the radio, how ragged his breathing would get when you entered a shroud of mist. He actually touched your face in front of the men when you went to speak with him after your experience at _Nzo ya Badiabulu_. He reached out and rubbed a line of soot off your cheek with the heel of his palm. No one said anything - no one would dare talk like that about you, and especially not about him. 

So no, it didn’t seem manipulative at first, but now you realize that this is probably exactly what _he_ told you to do, how he told you to treat Kazuhira; how to reign in a willful Second in Command who didn’t always ask permission. But Kaz is fragile now, putting a leash on him shouldn’t be necessary, seems cruel. Maybe he’s always been fragile. You want to go to him, but you know (instinctually, deep down, almost like a voice whispering in the back of your head) that you need to wait for him to come to you. He will always come to you. 

_The first time he does, it’s only been a week and a half since the Med Staff released him full time. He comes to deliver a Supply Report to your quarters personally. You still aren’t used to his new look, how he cocoons himself in layers of authority. It’s been nine years for him, but you’re only a few months removed from the old Commander Miller, with his buttoned down shirt collar and his rolled up sleeves - the only insignia of rank he wore was his confidence._

_After you discuss the paperwork, Kaz lingers, starts making a show of examining the single photograph on the wall and the discarded remnants of ammo casing and magazines on the table._

_“Something else you want to discuss?”_

_Kaz shakes his head, “no. Boss… I…”_

_“Are you feeling okay, Kaz?”_

_Kaz shudders and falls back against the door. He takes off his sunglasses and rubs his eyes, wipes something away before putting them back on. “No, Snake, I’m not fucking feeling okay. I’m all fucked up and my limbs are missing and I still can’t believe… I wake up every morning not believing that you’re back. And everything is still so fucked up. I’m sick and I’m…”_

_You cross the room and take his face in your hands. He flinches at the contact, but doesn’t move away. He sets his cane against the wall and raises his hand to clasp over your fingers._

_“I’m terrified,” he whispers, “of what we’ll have to become. And of you… seeing me like this. I meant to be better than this for you.”_

_“Kaz-”_

_“I’m broken like this. Barely useful to you. How can you even look at me?” Panic rises in his voice and you can see his pupils darting back and forth beneath his swollen eyelids, looking past you, at something only he can see. “I’m pathetic. I… I didn’t beg them when it was just my fingers and toes - I…_ laughed _at them. But I begged for my hand, Boss, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I begged for my leg.”_

_“Kaz, you’re spiralling, lost in dark thoughts.”_

_He can’t hear you. His hand is slowly tightening around your fingers, putting pressure on the knuckle joints. The leather of his glove creaks in the yawning silence of your quarters. “I didn’t… I didn’t care what happened to me, I begged for you. I knew you were coming back and that you would need me whole. If you… if you’re keeping me around out of pity, Boss, I swear… God, if it’s pity, just put a bullet between my eyes right now and throw me in the ocean. I couldn’t bear that.”_

_You move your thumbs to ghost over his cheekbones and lift his face, pull down at the flesh around his eyes so that he has no choice but to look at you. “Kaz, it’s okay. Calm down. Stay with me.”_

_His vision snaps clear and he stares at you with wide, wild eyes. “Don’t insult me,” he almost laughs, a cracked, haggard sound. “You don’t have to ask me that. I’m with you. I’ve always been with you. It’s you who -” he surges forward and grabs your collar, thumb on your throat. “You have to promise me. Never leave me. If you leave me again, I-”_

_You kiss him because it seems like the right thing to do. He kisses back hungrily, claws at your hair, bites down on your lip - accidentally, maybe, he’s working your mouth like he’s a drowning man gasping for air. It’s mechanical, instinctual for you - for him it’s all passion and buried need. This is what he came to your quarters for. In between kisses, he snarls: “if you ever leave me again, I won’t forgive you.” It’s not an empty threat._

… but even after that, there’s something off, something that numbs your fingers when you touch his face. He won’t talk to you about the torture, turns his head away and grimaces when you try to ask about the work he did in the nine years between. You see him from the outside, but the space between his cracks is unfathomable.

You wondered why you couldn’t pull his walls down the way you used to, the way you must have done in the past, for his devotion to you to be this all consuming. If you think back to that night - to your hands on his wrist and his hips, in his hair - you can almost see it, the shadow of the man who stands between you.

 

**[AND HIM]**  


The tape crackles and skips. Someone turns the recorder off, then on again. A chair is scraped across the floor and the hiss of an ignited flame fills the room. The scent of smoke soon follows. _He_ sighs.

“About Kazuhira…”

“John, we’re running low on time. Miller knows what to do, your Phantom won’t need to tell him. Are you telling me you don’t trust your _second in command_?”

“Kaz is perceptive and you told me that he’s grown suspicious over the years.”

“ _Paranoid’s_ more like it.”

“He’ll suspect something’s up unless _he_ knows how to act. Besides - if he’s going to succeed, he’ll need to know how to keep Kaz in line. You said you’ve worked with him a bit in these past few years - you must know how he is.”

A snort. “I know how he is alright. Not half as much as you do, I expect. But - technically - I’ve known him longer than you; I’ve vetted him thoroughly this last decade, out of respect to you. I get why chose him, why you kept him around in the past, but going foward? I think that he’s a security risk.”

“Trust me on this one, Adam.”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting soft and sentimental in your old age.”

“Funny. You, of all people, accusing me of making business personal. Don’t worry - after everything that’s happened, I have my priorities in line. This is _important_.”

The chair is set down nearby. It makes a dull thud in three stutters as the rubber feet hit the linoleum. “To understand Kaz, you need to know how we met. He and I, you and him. Actually, you were there, weren’t you? Of course you were - because you are me. But in another life, you saw this story from a different angle.”

He tells the story. It’s… familiar, as if viewed through fogged glass by an observer. It rolls through like a film reel - the flash of bomb blasts, the roar of gunfire, the ridiculous proclamation, a voice almost _obnoxiously_ confident despite having suffered total defeat.

The story ends with a fond chuckle, “ah - this is why don’t always kill them. Occasionally you’ll find diamonds caked beneath all the mud and gore. A man who fights that hard when he can’t win? That’s a man who will give you everything he has and then some.”

“This is the most important thing to know, the most important thing for you and I to remember: every man and woman who follows your orders, they have given themselves to you, heart, body and soul. You must use that responsibly. For those like us who are drawn to the battlefield, there is a certain propensity for bloodlust that coils in the lungs. It is your job to tame that in your men and teach them how to use their talents effectively. And because you give them purpose and direction, they give you everything.”

“What’s different about Kaz is that he expects something _more_ in return. It’s that economically minded part of him; in the same breath he milks pennies and dimes out of the offshore bank accounts, he’ll haggle for the price of his soul. All you need to do is show him a part of yourself that you’ve never shown anyone else and you’ll earn back every inch of work that went into recruiting him. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“That’s one way of putting it.” 

“Adam, refrain from the running commentary. As you said - we don’t have much time.”

“Sorry, _‘Boss’_.”

 _His_ voice comes closer; steady, confident steps. He reaches up and takes hold of the hanging lamp above, tips it. “With Kazuhira, be patient,” the light shines right down, blinds out everything else. “Occasionally, allow yourself to be tender. Give him enough rope and he’ll do amazing work for you - give him too much rope, he’ll hang himself. Don’t worry - he likes to be reeled in, no matter how much he protests.”

“Never knew you were such a romantic, John.”

The voice fills the room with laughter hard as slate rock. “On the battlefield, love doesn’t exist. I don’t know what love is, so neither will he.” The light is removed and the voice softens. Distant, but still inescapable.

“What does exist is loyalty. Not loyalty to a nation or a cause, but loyalty to the man next to you in the foxhole. Everything else is either arbitrary or transitory. That is the highest virtue we can show each other, and that is what Kaz is to you. Keep him in a privileged position at your side and he will gladly follow you into hell.”


	2. (KAZUHIRA)

**[YOU]**

If Kaz sits at the very, very edge of the safety grating on the submersible docks, if he undoes the gate and lets it fall free and throws his one and a half legs over the side and leans back on his only remaining hand and then closes his eyes so that he’s not seeing the blinking lights on the distant Command Platform, and all he can hear is the waves and the whirring machinery, and all he can smell is the ocean salt… sometimes if the wind shifts in a very specific way and the water breaks against the steel in the right way and he’s hit with just the faintest shock of misty sea water…

And when the goddamn _stars align_ , Kazuhira Miller can, maybe, just for five minutes remember that there are good things in the world and not think about the invisible pain that burns in his bones and the increasingly vile and difficult-to-refuse jobs rolling in and the men they lost to the parasites and that _thing_ , that _Phantom_ , pretending to be a person waiting for him at the end of the day.

\- all he wants is _five minutes_ of peace and quiet, but that’s next to impossible to get when you’ve made the unfortunate mistake of working with a man like Ocelot. His footsteps are unmistakable - careful, deliberate and punctuated always by the jingle of his ridiculous cowboy spurs.

“Don’t kill yourself over this, Miller.”

“I’m just getting a bit of fresh air.” Kaz inhales deep, savours the sting of the salt in his nostrils and throat. Thoughtfully, he adds: “Fuck off.”

“Excuse me for jumping to conclusions. You’ve been skulking around the base acting so jilted these past few weeks I was beginning to think you’d given up. And that would be bad for business - Mother Base needs its X.O. in top form. Nothing around here would get done without you.”

“You don’t have to pretend to kowtow to me anymore. I know the truth.”

“Part of my assignment here is to pretend to kowtow to you, so enjoy it while you can.”

Kaz eases his eyes open, but he doesn’t look at Ocelot yet. He’s only been down here three minutes and he intends to get his full five of R&R. He tips his head back and stares at the sky. The Base Development Platform is the furthest out from the main Command strut and the most sparsely populated, especially after the infection. At night, the sky above the Platform is an impenetrably dark blanket, pin-pricked with constellations so bright, Kaz can name them all even with his dimmed, blurry vision: Hydra, Pyxis, Leo, Canis Major, Crater and Antlia...

“How is it that you remember specific orders, but you had no idea that what we were building here was a diversionary tactic until the moment we heard it from _him_?”

Ocelot kicks his spurs against the metal grating beneath them and Kaz can see him moving his arm out of the corner of his vision. Ocelot makes a gun with his fingers and points it straight between his own eyes. “I’ve got a certain talent for very _precise_ selective memory. Can’t get found out for secrets you aren’t keeping.”

“A master liar can lie even to himself, huh?”

“I don’t think of it as lying. If you picture your brain as a series of corridors and doors, it’s easy enough to lock any of those doors shut and slip the key under a rug. All it takes is patience and self knowledge. Some advice you could benefit from.”

Kaz snorts. “I’ve spent quite enough time inside my own head these past few weeks.” _Months. Years._

“No, you’ve spent time obsessing over your grudges and infatuations. Your life might be easier if you’d slam shut a few of those rooms that are bothering you.”

Oh, and _there_ it is. Ocelot says everything with a whipping-thin lightness. Whether it was an intentional affectation meant to demonstrate how fucking above it all he was, or just a side effect of being a sociopathic spymaster, it was hard to say. Kaz’s carefully cultivated calm snaps in two and he breathes out through his nose, trying very hard not to show it.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’m gonna hold on those grudges a bit longer.”

“It is all the same to me.”

“Another part of your assignment?”

Ocelot hums. Kaz turns in time to catch an infuriating smirk twitching at his lip. “His orders concerning you were very specific. He said _‘Kazuhira will be upset. Let him be angry’_.”

Kaz clenches his fists around his cane and tries to keep his breathing even. He can imagine it, even after all this time, exactly the tone Big Boss uses when saying his full name.

“And what are you supposed to do if I don’t stop being angry? Does he-” Kaz almost says _‘does he even care if I leave?’_ , but it sounds a little too _“sixteen year old getting dumped”_. Ocelot takes off one of his gloves and begins cracking his knuckles one by one.

“He told me that I should do everything I can to make sure you understand, but if you want to _leave_ , I’m not to stop you.”

“Huh. No orders to kill me if it looks like I’ll bolt?”

Ocelot slips his glove on and starts on the other hand. The hollow crunch of his joints is audible even above the soft, ocean wind and every crack jolts right down Kaz’s spine, reminding him of a similar sound, the wet wrench of his right shoulder being dislocated ten minutes before they started in on it with the heated machete. He digs his fingers into his thigh to give himself something to focus on, to stop himself from doing a full body shudder each time Ocelot massages one of his knuckles.

When both his gloves are back on, Ocelot unholsters one of his pistols and begins to spin it. He chuckles, “believe you me, Miller - were it my decision, I’d have put a bullet in your head the moment you sulked out that door. Nothing personal. But John said no.”

Kaz looks away to hide the bitterness in his grimace. _Don’t think you’re better than me because you use his first name_.

“He’s really not afraid that in my -” Kaz exhales shakily, tries to snarl, doesn’t quite make it, “- my _jilted_ rage I’ll run off and sell secrets to one of his enemies, or the UN, or the American Government?”

“No.”

Kaz keeps his face turned away. Ocelot doesn’t need to know how thoroughly Big Boss has his number.

“When I pushed the issue, he said -” Kaz can hear the sound of the gun being flipped. It whirls twice before Ocelot catches it and slides it back into its holster, “- that if it came to that, he’d do the honour himself. Said you’d know why.”

 _Of course_ \- going against Big Boss directly would be suicide, and Snake had promised long ago to play Kaz’s _kaishaku_. That thought almost makes Kaz laugh - but mostly, it makes him sick to his stomach, sick enough that he almost pitches forward. The only thing that keeps him upright and steeple straight is his determination to not give Ocelot one more inch of satisfaction. Outside, he is placid, but inside his mind is spinning its tires again, asking the same questions it’s been rolling around uselessly for the last three weeks. _‘How is it possible for him to be this goddamn possessive of me but he won’t even tell me… he won’t even see me? What does he think I am? Does he think I’ll wait for him like a dog? Is that what I did these past nine years?’_

“You should go talk to the Boss.”

“W-what?” Kaz’s gaze flutters. He freezes up. _Is he… is he here?_

Ocelot chuckles, “no, not _that_ one. The Boss here. He was made partially to fulfill that dream you had - he’ll flounder without your guidance, and this is an important project. The men are starting to wonder why you two suddenly seem so -” he trails off and chooses his words carefully with a jaunty flick of his wrist, “ - so _divided_. It would be best to at least act like nothing has changed.”

“It’s already been taken care of. I’ve said everything to him that I need to say. He understands where we both stand, and what our working relationship is going to be moving forward.”

“Does he? I’m still handling the majority of mission briefings and staff assignment consultations. That _isn’t_ part of my assignment and I can’t pretend I enjoy doing all this fussy busywork you so excel at. Really, Miller - he’s still the same man he was three weeks ago. Why don’t you just _close your eyes_ and pretend.” Ocelot takes the second gun out from his chest holster and twirls it around his pointer finger before flinging it into a double spin. “Honestly, with him you don’t even _have_ to close your eyes to pretend.”

Kaz swings his cane in tight, confident arc and slaps the gun out of the air into the water. Ocelot watches it plop beneath the surface with a distant, subdued but very tangible expression of annoyance. His eyebrows knit together and he drawls: “How unlike you, Miller. That was a very expensive gun.”

Kaz gets up the way he’s grown accustomed to: in four steps - plam, knee, heel and the long, embarrassing crawl upright with his crutch. “You want me to talk to him? Fine. I’ll talk to him tonight. I would really hate to further complicate your already painfully convoluted web of duties.”

Ocelot gives him a thin, fake smile and ducks into a melodramatic stage bow. “You’re a lifesaver, Miller.”

 _Yeah, yeah, I’ll talk to him._ Kaz struggles up the stairs, one at a time. _You want him all the way back under my thumb? Fine - I can do that._

On the main deck, it takes his eyes a moment to adjust. He almost sees better in the dark, but it’s all bright edges and smears of strange, blue light that reel when he moves. He was afraid that he’d been changed, worried at the way he could always see the outline of Quiet’s skeleton when she snuck around the base. Code Talker told him not to worry, _‘you’re not like me’_ , but Kaz still keeps his pace slow, deliberate, exploratory, around the men. Better they think he was blinder than he actually was.

Before calling the chopper, Kaz stalks around the 4th deck for a bit, ears keenly searching for laughter and the crackle of a radio. Sure enough, he finds a cabal of about ten soldiers hiding in one of the under-side cargo storage rooms, smoking and playing poker. The radio is blaring a new wave song from about four years back - ah, _Turning Japanese_ , a song Kaz has long tried to not be a “total drag” about. No such luck tonight. He hobbles down the stairs and clangs his cane loudly three times on one of the overhead pipes. The conversation stops immediately and ten terrified eyes turn to greet him.

Raging Crow, Flaming Buffalo… the rest were newer recruits, or Combat Unit men who usually dealt with Ocelot. Kaz couldn’t place all the faces, but he knew that Buffalo had a particular talent for procuring the kind of hard liquor usually banned on the base.

“Having fun, soldiers?” Kaz asks with artificial cheer. He’s always had a reputation as a perfectionist and an occasional slave driver, but lately he’s also earned the moniker of “total hard-ass”. He can’t deny that he relishes it a bit. Raging Crow stumbles to his feet and stands to attention.

“Yes, sir, Commander Miller, sir! It’s Friday night!”

“I see that.” Kaz gestures with his cane to the plastic cups they’re drinking from, “that smells a little too rich to be beer. Something I should know about?”

Flaming Buffalo gets up immediately and salutes. Her speech is noticeably slurred. “I take full re-responsibility for all of this, sir! If you must put someone in the brig, let it be me! I’ll answer to the Boss himself.”

“Calm down. I’m not trying to bust you, soldier.” Kaz leans back, puts his weight on his crutch and attempts a strained smile as a peace-offering. “I just want some fucking whiskey.”

*

He should have known.

That’s all it comes down to in the end.

The Phantom has scars that cross his face in three directions. Big Boss had not been wounded that way, had been shielded from the brunt of the blast by a loyal soldier. Kaz should know, he’d spent so much time stealing glances at his body while they were both being worked on... the scars - they didn’t look like shrapnel wounds, no, they looked like someone had taken his damn face off and sewed a new one on it should have been so _obvious_ -

There were other reasons he should have known. Kaz thinks back to the last time Big Boss touched him - ( _the night before Cuba: Kaz clicks the tape player off and stares at Snake through the darkness. Their discussion has gone on so long that the sun long since went down and no one bothered to get up and turn on a lamp. “C’mon Boss,” Kaz sighs. He’s never felt this drained and hollow after a mission briefing. “Don’t make me ask.” Snake is staring out the narrow window. He glances at Kaz from the corner of his good eye, oblivious. Kaz stands up, rounds the desk, takes his sunglasses off. “Come over here and fucking kiss me.” Time hasn’t damaged this memory. He can still feel it - Snake’s almost inhumanely strong hands clawing at the gaps between his bones. Snake would always massage his hands up the length of Kaz’s spine like he was trying to deconstruct it, like a raccoon thumbing through a bird’s skeleton beneath running water..._ ) - the Phantom’s hands were never so meticulous, how could he have ever, _ever_ been fooled by something else?

Kaz finds a secluded corner of the Combat Deck and slumps against one of the empty cargo canisters, secure that he’s chosen a place where no unwary soldiers are going to stumble across him downing an entire three quarters of a quart of whiskey by himself. He hasn’t gotten drunk in… hell, nearly _six_ years. He drank too much, those first few years after the MSF. Woke up in a lot of strange places, did a lot of unsafe things with a lot of unsafe people. It took a job gone wrong in Rhodesia for it to really hit him: he was the “Boss” now. He couldn’t just slum around self-destructively, waiting for Snake to wake up and come drag him out of whatever den of ill repute he’d dug himself into by the scruff of his neck. ( _Like the Phantom had done, ha ha, on a white horse and everything_.)

He gets drunk faster than he expects. Fair - he’s got less discipline now, less flesh, _less blood_. The whiskey burns hotter than the salt air, but not as hot as the pain in his missing limbs. It Makes his bones heavy, makes the air soft. It helps him think, helps him decide what to do. For what he plans to do, he’s gonna have to be so drunk he can’t remember his fucking name.

\- the reason he should have _known_ is because the Phantom bowed too easily under argumentation and pressure. It was easy for Kaz to change his mind or bully him into different decisions. Even the few times the Phantom held fast to his convictions, he simply turned his cheek and shut Kaz out - never argued, never lectured. Kaz thought that after everything, Snake was simply tired. _‘It’s been nine years; I’ve changed, he’s changed. I’m a… I’m a cripple now, is he really going to pick a fight and punch me in the teeth because we have different ideas about how to handle traitors?’_

But maybe he would have. The real Big Boss might not have handled him with such a soft hand just because he’d lost something as insignificant as a few limbs. Snake would have thrown him away immediately, or treated him no differently. ( _But which is it? Which did he do?_ ) That Kaz had so easily accepted the Phantom’s gentle, protective hands… well, it was a carefully crafted fantasy and he’d been stupid enough to indulge in it. He’d been vigilant from all angles except the one that he was most vulnerable from, nothing new there.

Big Boss would have killed Quiet. He wouldn’t have let Kaz misjudge all that shit with the kids. He would have killed Huey, one swift bullet in the throat like the cowardly fuck deserved. Would have talked Kaz down from all that _‘watch your neighbour’_ bullshit. Would never have lent his face to those ridiculous _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ posters. He wouldn’t have needed them. _Is that what I am? Is my judgement so poor without Snake guiding my hand? Am I-_

No, no - Kaz grips the bottle tight and holds his breath before going for another throat-flooding swig. The whiskey is almost gone. Even sitting down, Kaz can already see the sky spinning. No, it’s no one’s fault but Big Boss’s. Can’t even blame the Phantom - he was just doing what he was programmed to do, passively absorbing orders, responding to messages buried deep in his subconscious. Kaz’s throat burns with the memory of the Phantom’s metal hand closed around it; even on the verge of asphyxiating someone half to death, his eye was blank, impassive. Snake... he’d always been most alive when enacting violence. Kaz can remember him drilling the men in CQC back in Colombia... when he had a man’s throat crushed between the jaw of his arm, his eye would glint like a diamond: rare and precious and piercing.

Kaz knew how they were different now, Snake and the Phantom. He’d examined the entire goddamn venn diagram. So, the Phantom would be easy to control. Time to go put the theory into effect. It takes Kaz three tries to hoist himself up on his cane. He stumbles with his shoulder against the wall, wanting his right arm back so bad he can’t stop from cursing under his breath the whole, wretched trip to the barracks.

Of course, the Phantom isn’t in his quarters. Probably still out running a mission. Kaz fumbles out his keycard and passes it over the lock - his is a master key that opens every door on the base except the Boss’s private ones, but _Venom Snake_ sleeps in the barracks just like a normal soldier. Things like that are why the men love him so much, the same way they loved Big Boss.

Kaz examines the room. The walls are almost completely bare except for a few signed photographs of the men from the annual birthday parties and a snapshot of DD holding a fulton in his mouth. The Phantom keeps his favourite pictures on the chopper where he spends most of his time. Last time Kaz was in there alone he snatched the photo of himself and the Boss off the wall, the one from the original Mother Base with Morpho and that one medic who’s real name Kaz couldn’t remember, _still_ can’t remember, isn’t that the fucking icing on the cake? He’d stuffed it in his pocket before Pequod could notice. It’s still in his pocket. He leans against the Phantom’s unused bedside table and takes the photo out, smooths down the edges.

 _‘It shouldn’t be personal,’_ he tells himself. _‘It’s always been about the business, not about the man, right? That’s what you told yourself. And in a way, hasn’t he given you a great gift? Your very own private military business that you can run yourself with a version of him that looks at you like a real partner, meanwhile Snake runs around god-knows-where building his idealistic One World dream shit that doesn’t make any fucking money. You’re both doing what you’re best at and technically still working together. The Phantom is a tool, a weapon, and both your hand and his are on the hilt. Right? Can’t you live with that?’_

“Fuck -” Kaz sways, the whiskey makes his fingers numb and heavy. He lifts the photo to his mouth so that he can rip it in half, but it tumbles out of his hand and flutters to the floor. He steps on it with his one remaining foot and grinds the bottom of his shoe right into Snake’s smug fucking face. There’s nothing he can do to hurt Big Boss the way Big Boss hurt him because Big Boss barely sees him. Snake saw him, maybe, enough to care when Kaz stepped out of line, when he slept with other people, when he… shit, Snake cared enough to listen to his boring stories about his crappy childhood. When Kaz was upset, Snake sat with him down by the river and tolerated how incoherent he got when he stuffed his kiseru with marijuana. What the fuck would Kaz even _say_ to Big Boss now? The best he can do is take Snake’s newest gun and try to point it right back at him.

He’s sober by the time the Phantom shows up. Venom Snake pauses in the doorway for a moment, hesitates before stepping in and locking it shut behind him.

“Commander Miller. Has something happened?

“If it was an emergency,” Kaz gestures to the discarded radio beside him on the table, “I would have called you.”

“Business that can’t wait, then?”

Kaz tries to meet the Phantom’s eye, but he can’t even look at him. He makes him sick - a person so weak that his entire life - his body, his identity, his memories and dreams had all been conquered and subsumed by another man. And he _accepted_ it, reacted with _gratitude_. Disgusting.

The Phantom comes closer, concern evident in the lightness of his steps and how he holds his arms tense, ready to reach out at any moment.

“Commander Miller?”

“I-” _shit_. Kaz used to be so good at seducing people. It had been like second nature as recently as a year and a half ago. But what was he supposed to do now, with this broken body? He sways on his uneven legs. The Phantom steps forward and, almost instinctively, grabs Kaz’s shoulder to steady him.

“Are you okay?” he asks with infinite patience and understanding and Kaz sees his in. He lets his weight shift to one side, makes it look natural. The Phantom grabs his other shoulder to keep him upright, slides it halfway down his back. “Have you been drinking?”

Kaz nods, as blearily as he can manage. The Phantom responds to vulnerability in a way Snake never did. Snake would be telling him to stop feeling so damn sorry for himself already, wasn’t he a warrior? _That’s not the Kaz I know. You’re stronger than this_.

“Ka- Commander Miller, It’s a long way here from your office. You can’t be seen wandering around drunk on base, not with the esteem the men hold for you.”

Ah - Kaz presses his eyes shut. There it is. It sounds _almost_ right, but no - the Phantom’s just being a responsible Boss here, he’s not chiding Kaz like he’s a goddamn kid who doesn’t know any better. “I know that…” Kaz makes his voice hoarse, hollow. “I just… don’t know anymore… what I’m supposed to do with… all of this.”

“I’m not asking you to make a decision yet. Take all the time you need, Commander, but I can’t have you destroying yourself like this. Mother Base still needs you working at top capacity.”

Kaz forces himself to laugh - a small, rattled chuckle in the back of his throat. He sways closer, fake-accidental, and says: “ _Boss_ , you take such good care of me.”

The Phantom freezes up. His flesh fingers go even tighter than his metal ones. There: open an inch, all Kaz has to do now is get his foot in. The Phantom glances at the door, then back. _All these emotions happening in his face and still, his eye is empty, just like his fucking soul_.

“... you should leave,” he whispers. “This isn’t a good idea.”

“Why?”

“Because the last time I was alone in a room with you, you deliberately pushed me.”

Kaz hooks his hand under the lapel of the Phantom’s uniform and drags him close so that he can whisper in his ear. “What are you afraid that I’ll push you to do… _Snake_?”

The Phantom exhales audibly at that. “Commander Miller -”

“Call me _Kaz_.”

“Commander Miller, you aren’t thinking straight.”

“You’re right, I’m not.” He buries his face in the crook of the Phantom’s neck. “I need you,” he mouths into the scarred skin. “I _need_ you to call me by my name.”

“ _Kaz_...” the Phantom breathes, and Kaz can feel his resolve crumbling bit by bit. He smiles, unseen, and grazes his lips up the Phantom’s jaw. The Phantom pulls away. “… I thought you would want to leave.”

“And go where? I’m so lost without him,” _not entirely a lie_ , Kaz’s brain sneers at him. “I’d be lost without Diamond Dogs. I’m lost… without you.”

The Phantom doesn’t answer, but he does set a hand - the real one - atop Kaz’s head. He runs his fingers through his hair, almost absentmindedly. “It’s not right, that you were with me when you thought I was him. I won’t take advantage of you.”

“As far as you’re concerned, is there really a difference between you and him?”

“Kaz…”

“If you want to say that it was rape, it was him who raped me. And he raped you too - took everything you had, the same way he did to me. But he’s not in this room, Boss. You’re in this room. You’re the one who’s here.”

The Phantom presses his eye shut and sighs. It’s a sound of surrender. His fingers curl around the back of Kaz’s head and he pulls him in, touches their foreheads together. God, even his breath, upon closer examination, smells nothing like Snake. “Kaz. Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Boss, I am telling you what to do. I’m telling you to do _whatever you want to me_.”

The thrill of triumph makes the kiss that follows almost bearable.

**[ME]**

_It takes you three months to work up the nerve to listen to her interrogation tapes. Even then, you can barely stand to hear her voice. Alone in a dusty motel in Chile, holding earphones tight over your ears, watching the orange light pour through the window and all you can think about is the fact that two of the last ten words you said to Paz were “you bitch”. You hadn’t been brave enough to blame yourself, not with blood and soot still on your hands, not in front of the Boss._

_You save your tape for last. It’s shorter than the rest, notably so. Once you would have been proud that a great pretender like her found you so opaque. You feel like that part yourself has been scrubbed off with metal bristles - you’re made of glass now, and you feel all the shitty, pathetic things that go along with that trite metaphor._

_What she says about you… when she says the word infatuation you actually stop the tape and laugh, as if she’s there for you to bluster at, to say something snide to deflect such a ridiculous accusation. No, no, that’s not it - but here you are, holding the reigns on your own finally and missing Snake so much that it’s like a nicked vein, a rock in your lung, a hole in your fucking head -_

Every time you pass a phone booth, you turn over the quarters in your pocket. One call would put you on route to meet this man of Zero’s, the one who knows where Snake’s body is. Probably somewhere in Europe, kept safe behind gilded doors secretly guarded by Zero’s remaining black ops loyalists; you had gotten to know the man well enough to see that he had expensive taste.

Calling would be admitting defeat, though, wouldn’t it? You’ve held the survivors together by the skin of your teeth. They’re dispersed through Central America right now, connected through a well-seeded communication network, either in hiding, or cozy with Amanda’s troops, helping them fight her war pro-bono. If Snake woke up, he wouldn’t accept Zero’s kindness, surely, not when it was being offered with the man’s right hand after his left reached out to backhand them. When Snake woke up, he’d find them, the stragglers of his loyal army. All they had to do was dig in and wait. _All you have to do is wait_.

Eventually, you make the call.

It takes you to Greece where you wait for the network to do it’s magic. The man it brings to your door introduces himself as ‘Ocelot’, which you don’t quite believe at first. Snake has mentioned this man to you in passing, but the ridiculous conceit of living your adult life named after a medium sized cat - not even one of the big, cool cats - doesn’t really hit you until you see him in the flesh.

Actually, you say that out loud. “Really? Why not ‘Tiger’ or ‘Panther’?”

Ocelot is non-plussed. The speed and ease with which he retorts makes you suspect that this isn’t the first time he’s fielded this question. “ ‘Panthers’ are just Jaguars with a pigmentation disorder.” He’s wearing cowboy boots and a long, loose braid in his hair. It’s tied with a red ribbon.

“Actually, they’re an ancient mythical beast favoured as a steed by the Greek God Dionysus. It is said that they give off a particular scent that attracts a creature like a siren’s song. When lured in and pacified, the Panthers feasts on their flesh.”

Ocelot gives you a long, sour once-over, a single eyebrow cocked, hands on his waist. He’s comparing you against something, but you can’t figure out what. You already recognize the scent coming off him in waves: it’s bullshit.

But you work with him. You do what he says, humour his requests, partake in half-witty repartee with him when you meet face to face. Once, against your better judgement, you have a few drinks with him and share “war” stories. You get him talking about Snake, and suddenly things come into focus. Ocelot plays his cards close to his heart - possibly has no heart or cards to be holding close at all - but when he speaks of Big Boss, of _John_ , there’s a warmth in his voice that is devotional, damn near _knightly_. Oh, _oh, of course_ -

\- but it’s all treading water and tracking minutes… after months of it, you’re still no closer to seeing him than you were laying low in Chile.

When you ask him about it - swallow all your fucking pride and ask for what’s due to you - Ocelot regards you cooly and asks: “Tell me. What will change if you see the body?”

You don’t answer, so Ocelot makes one of his stupid little hand gestures and taps two fingers to his temple. “Oh, I get it - you walk into the room and all the angels start singing. He awakens from his coma like Snow White the moment he hears your voice?”

“Are you looking to get punched?”

“If you get to punch me, would you stop asking to see him?”

“I might be willing to haggle over this if you let me break your nose and throw in a bonus kick in the balls.”

“It’s no use,” Ocelot sighs and raises his palms.“Neither thing is going to happen - you’re not going to hit me, and you aren’t going to see Snake until he wakes up. What you’re going to do is play nice and do as you’re told. The next few years are going to be difficult enough without all this useless fantasizing. Emotions and dreams don’t get results, Miller, only actions.” 

Ocelot smirks and shoots you finger guns before leaving. You slouch against the wall and fume - the man is so damn smug and opaque… every time you talk to him, you feel like you’re losing some contest or exam you never agreed to participate in. You want to say something immature and petty like, _‘oh yeah, well I know what he sounds like while getting his dick sucked’._ That’s not even it, _‘I know what his emotional fragility sounds like, what he sounds like when doubting his humanity, the exact shade of his eye when he hesitates and questions himself; and not because I’m some master spy manipulator, I know it because he showed it to me.’_

You bite down on your tongue until you taste metal. What the hell is _wrong_ with you? Ocelot’s implications were not misplaced - this is pathetic, obsessive. You weren’t this bad when Snake was actually around, were you? _What the fuck is all this “absence makes the heart grow fonder” bullshit?_ You can clearly remember a time when all you wanted was to get away from Big Boss, to slip out from under his shadow and show the bastard that your own shadow ate just as much light. Now all you want is just to hear Snake’s voice one more time. No one else, _no one else_ , says your name with as much depth and meaning and purpose -

“No,” you tell yourself out loud. “I am not doing this.” You grab your leather jacket and a handful of cash from the place you hide your money behind the wall panel and you go out on the town to get laid.

You meet an Algerian exchange student with long, braided dreads in her hair and a lot of thoughts about the legacy of the Napoleonic Code. You and she have similar opinions on Tito and Aimé Césaire; finding a man willing to intellectually engage with a woman is still rare even in this day and age, so you’re basically in the moment you slide next to her at the bar and order a tequila shot. You get too drunk and phone in the whole thing - it’s easy, as long as you go down on the woman and decline her offer to return the favour, to come away smelling like roses even when you’re half assing it, right? At least, that’s how it’s always been for you, how it was before -

_“Are you thinking about someone else?”_

_“No, I-” you’re too drunk to stop her from snatching off your sunglasses and pushing back your hair._

_“Isn’t everyone?” she whispers. “Why would we go out and do something like this if we weren’t?” She strokes her thumbs down the long, jagged shrapnel scars that mar your jawline._

The next day you book a flight leaving Greece. You contact the remaining MSF soldiers and tell them to meet you in Egypt. You’ve taken a series of jobs Africa. You need to get out of the mundane world, back to the bloody places where you can think straight and remember what it means to be alive. 

_In Rhodesia…_

In Rhodesia, you try too hard to be clever. You take a job from the Rhodesian government that, even on paper, makes you sick to your stomach. They’ve been releasing anthrax to weaken the rebels cause - this is the kind of thing a politician will only admit to a white PMC Commander with a name like “Benedict” Miller. He’s impressed by your impeccable American accent and scarred face. _‘A village up north near Mangula… we’ve had an ‘accident’. Need to burn everything to the ground, no evidence. Not the kind of thing we can do ourselves, you understand?’_

You also take a job from the leader of a local ZANLA unit. They want undeniable proof that the government is behind the recent rural outbreaks of meningitis and cholera, and they want you to extract any survivors who can still talk. 

Easy enough, you told your unit, to burn some empty houses and fleece the floundering British officials for all they were worth while lending a hand to a worthy cause. It’s two paychecks, and the kind of strings free playing-both-sides action that only an army without a nation has the luxury of getting away with. Exactly what you guys were made for.

 _Easy enough_ but about five miles outside the village your unit gets caught in a firing war between the local Rhodesian armed police and a ZIPRA battalion backed by Red Army infantry. You’d been trudging for hours through a rainstorm so thick you don’t hear the bullets until they’re right on top of you. Both sides assume you’re the enemy - soldiers with no national branding, armed to the teeth with customized weaponry. You drag your unit through mostly in intact, but your medic, Cicada - one of the old school MSF men - takes a bullet to the lungs for the trouble.

When you arrive at the village - Cicada bleeding out all over Eagle Ray’s shoulders - it’s already been burnt to the ground. The sky is clearing, throwing a ray of misty, yellow light onto the one remaining structure: a badly damaged house patched over with sheets of metal and cloth. A makeshift infirmary.

Inside - _the scent of bile and feces, so many flies that the buzzing is a deafening din. Cassowary speaks Ndebele passably; what she gets from the chapped lips of the dying villagers is that the police shot the Doctor (a travelling country-side physician; an ex-pat, who’d studied medicine and Ghana but returned home when he heard...). After that they burned every healthy man and woman alive in their houses. They left the rest to die slowly from swollen, rotting limbs and the fevers boiling their brains. Mostly children and the elderly. It’s difficult to sort the corpses from the living, what are you supposed to -_

“What are we supposed to do?” Leopard asks. He’s angry - at the situation at… at _you_. You lead them into this mess, didn’t prepare well enough, took too much on, put them in the position of being executioners without _thinking_.

“We can’t take any of them,” Cassowary whispers. “But if we kill them… Master Miller, you said that we wouldn’t be doing the Rhodesian Government’s dirty work, but this…?” Her mother was of Zulu descent; with the Apartheid government backing the Rhodesians, she’s too close to this. You shouldn’t have brought her here.

“Master?” Eagle Ray interrupts, panic cracking his normally stoic demeanour. “Cicada… his lips are going blue. Pulse is weak.”

“Shit!” Leopard swears, kicks a nearby can. The clang echoes through the near empty village like thunder. You’re losing them, you can tell. They’re looking at you with hard, terrified eyes; their trust in you is faltering. If you were here solely on ZANLA’s behalf, this would be different. You shouldn’t have dealt with the Brits at all - you’re putting tainted blood on their hands. Leopard presses his eyes shut then turns to Cicada and draws his gun. “Nothing we can do.”

You grab the gun from him. The grip almost slips through your hands, they’re so slick with blood. “I’ll do it myself,” you say.

The men stare at you, the fear and disgust in their eyes flickering full, turning into something else. You stand up straight and replace the gun’s magazine, filling the chamber with fresh bullets. You click off the safety and aim the muzzle right between Cicada’s filmy eyes. “The Boss would have done it himself.”

With that, you’ve won them back. When Cicada’s dead, the squad slowly rises to salute you one by one. Then you enter the infirmary and shoot every patient in the head twice.

There are no heroes on the battlefield. There aren’t even any humans. Only dogs of war. This is what you need to do, to justify the trust your Boss put in you.

*

_When you talked to Amanda about going back, she asked you why: “You’re free. My compas and I… we would give anything to have a reason to leave the fight”. To her, the war is a weight around her neck, slowly suffocating her ragtag group of farmers and ousted academics. It took her father and her brother, it's been taking her homeland from her inch by inch since before she was born._ (You don't want to die in a war, but you would die for...)

_You can’t give her an answer. Snake always knew the words to explain it, the itch that begins at the back of your skull and crawls into the marrow of every single bone, molds your hands into the shape they need to be to hold a gun. It’s worse, with Big Boss’s shadow cast over you day and night now - that’s what it’s like trying to keep up with him: an animal, chewing off its own leg to stay in a trap._

**[AND HIM]**

Three days after the disaster with Paz and ZEKE, and Snake still hasn’t said anything. At the time, it was a relief that the Boss heard him out without jumping to (very reasonable) conclusions, but now Kaz is nervous. The calmer Snake is, the more _normal_ he acts, the more Kaz feels like there’s an axe hanging over his head.

They go take a smoke break out by the forward guns - observe the repairs together, collect the names of everyone on the work detail so that they can give them personal thanks when the job is done. When they round the far edge of the platform - where the ocean wind is so strong that voices don’t carry - Kaz leans against the safety rail and cocks his chin, inviting the Boss to come stand with him. Snake does so, inhaling the last dregs of his cigar as they watch the sunset light the south atlantic a brilliant shade of orange.

Snake stubs out his cigar on the rail. “Something bothering you, Kaz?”

“Yeah. Shouldn’t you be furious with me?”

“Mmm.”

“I lied to you. For… for a _while_.”

“You did.”

“I… what are you waiting for? Aren’t you gonna at least give me a demerit? Demote me? _Yell at me_? Hell, Boss, throw me in the brig for a few days. I can handle it.”

“I don’t really see why that would be necessary.”

“Really? I invited spies into our base and sold information to someone who wants to destroy you. And you’re just fine with me waltzing around base giving orders like nothing happened?”

“It’s your wisdom I question, Kaz, not your loyalty. And I already knew that your lack of wisdom would be a liability when I decided to recruit you.”

“You-” Kaz laughs and pushes up his sunglasses so that he can rub his eyes - he’s been up nearly two days straight. He leaves them up - it gets dark so fast, way out here in the middle of nowhere. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”

Snake shrugs in response.

“It’s… really that easy?”

“Nothing is going to be easy for us ever again, Kaz. It’d be foolish for me to throw away someone as useful as you right now.”

“Wow, Boss. You sure know how to sweet-talk a guy.” Kaz says it sarcastically, but his chest contracts. He _feels_ sincerely sweet-talked, which is probably a little bit pathetic, but Big Boss doesn’t drop the word ‘useful’ into a conversation lightly.

The aircraft caution lamps are blinking on one by one, turning the evening around them all red and hazy. Kaz steals a glance at Snake, drinks in the sight of his angular, scruffy profile drenched in blood-coloured light. He’s so opposite the kind of thing Kaz is usually attracted to that he sometimes wonders what the hell is wrong with him that he can’t get enough of it. He plasters on a goofy grin and sways his hip to the side, bumping against Snake in a manner that could look almost accidental from outside observation.

“Hey,” he murmurs, “it’s getting late. Why don’t you come back to my quarters for a little R&R, huh Boss?”

“Don’t you think that’s being a little forward?”

“Yeah. But I’ve got some appreciation to show for how merciful you’ve decided to be. Let me show you how _loyal_ and _useful_ I really am.” Kaz moves to catch his fingers in the belt-loops of Snake’s uniform, but Snake stops him - grabs his wrist and pulls him forward. Snake sets his other hand on his cheek and suddenly Kaz wishes he hadn’t pushed up his shades because the look his Boss is giving him cuts right down to the center, and he’s certain he probably looks really flustered and stupid in response.

Snake strokes his thumb along the line of his cheekbone. “ _Kaz_ , it’s okay-” he says, and Kaz loves the way Snake says his name. Back when he first left home, ‘Kaz’ had been a defiant attempt to claim his American ancestry, to shorten a name westerners always pronounced off anyway and make it sound snappy and cool, like ‘Brad’ or ‘Mike’, but it always sounded weird and clumsy, stumbling off people’s tongues with those drawling, broad american vowels. But, oh, when Snake says it, it sounds like his true name, the name he was always meant to have.

“I never said it wasn’t okay, Boss.”

“You’re still jittery. You don’t have to prove anything to me. I know where you stand. You know what your place is.” 

“Of course,” Kaz swallows hard, his eyes wide and affixed on Snake’s intense, one-eyed stare. “With you. By your side.”

Snake lets go of Kaz’s wrist and locks an arm around his waist instead, then he kisses him hard. Hard enough that they stumble back and Kaz has to turn his arm to brace them against the safety rail. He throws his other arm around Snake’s neck and pulls him tighter to deepen the kiss. They probably look ridiculous, Kaz thinks, two grown men in military fatigues practically re-creating the famous WWII photograph of the soldier and the nurse, but very soon he stops thinking about anything at all.

When Snake pulls away, Kaz tries to drag him back in, but he’s not strong enough. Snake uses a half-hearted CQC move to duck free of Kaz’s greedy embrace and puts a hand on his chest to hold him at arms-length.

“You’ve been working hard the last few days, Kaz. Get some sleep.”

 _Seriously?_ “Snake -”

Snake holds up one finger to silence him. “Huey wants us at the R&D staff meeting tomorrow at 5AM sharp. We need to discuss the repairs to ZEKE.”

“Uh… yeah, right. Naturally.”

“Goodnight, Kaz.” 

Snake gives an awkward, two-fingered wave as he turns to leave. When he’s good and gone, Kaz spins around and puts his elbows on the rail. He buries his fingers in his hair and curses under his breath. Shit, _shit_. He’s in too deep. He’s lost it now - his deals with Cipher and Zero were his last leverage in this contest, the final thing that kept his dream separate from Snake’s dream, kept it from being _subsumed_ , made him different from all the other soldiers Snake fultoned in and hammered into starry eyed obedience.

He’s embarrassed that the whole house of cards came down so easy, toppled by one tiny little bit of missing key information. Now he was really and truly dependent on Snake - there was no possible exit plan; despite his claims to Zero of _neutrality_ , he’d planted his flag firmly in Big Boss’ camp - there would be repercussions and he’d have to come clean about the rest of it soon. _There’s no reason to take it as a loss, Kazuhira_ something in the back of his head is telling him. _Besides, isn’t this exactly where you want to be?_

The Boss, he’d used an awful lot of “we” and “us” these last few days. Kaz stares down at the dark water. Even with the sun nearly disappeared beneath the western horizon, Mother Base’s legs still cast thick shadows beneath the water line. Deep roots, roots that belong to Kaz every bit as much as they do to Snake. _His dream, my dream, working in tandem to build something amazing. Side by side, we can do anything._

It didn’t sound so bad, really, to rephrase it as _‘Our Dream’_. Ours.

Like Snake said, the whole world could come gunning for them, but it wouldn’t matter. Together they were strong and it would _take_ the whole world to tear them apart and tear them down.


	3. (JOHN)

**[YOU]**

“So. What do we do with him now?”

There’s something beautiful in the calm that follows a battle - this one had been quick, brutal, and efficiently executed on Snake’s side; for his opponents, it was a confused scramble beneath an embarrassingly untested Commander. The clearing smells like metal, blood and damp moss. It’s silent but for the croaking of frogs and the quiet hum of gathering flies.

Snake - still on his knees - rolls back to sit on his heels and deliberates for all of two seconds. “We take him back with us.”

“B-boss?”

The jungle canopy fractures the afternoon sun, casting puzzle-piece patches of yellow, green and shadow over Snake and the single soldier he’s kept behind with him. A square of light falls over the face of Snake’s defeated enemy - the man who’d requested a samurai’s execution; the light turns his blonde hair white, and highlights the blood staining his plain uniform. 

Snake levels a serious look at the soldier. “Do I need to repeat myself?”

The soldier panics, but subtly - beneath the surface. It’s mostly in how his eyelids flutter. He’s new to Snake’s army - an english speaker, soft-spoken and with one of those personalities that tended to blend into the background. He was a crack shot, an amateur wrestler and, Snake suspected, a med school drop-out. That last one was the reason he’d been promoted so quickly.

“With all due respect, sir, he tried to kill you.”

“Yeah. That almost never happens to me. Figure anyone who can trick me like that might be a valuable recruit. C’mon, I’ll lift him and you bandage his torso. If we don’t stop that bleeding, there’ll be nothing left to bring back but a corpse.”

Begrudgingly, the new recruit helps Snake clean and dress the “samurai”’s considerable wounds. When they lay him back down, Snake removes his fallen foe’s aviators and folds them neatly into his front pocket. He checks the pulse, pulls the unconscious man’s eyes open one by one. “Breathing’s shallow, but I think he’ll live. What do you think?”

“The wounds weren’t as deep as they looked. It’s mostly shock - he’ll recover fast. Hah -” the soldier wipes his brow. “Did I hear right? He said he was Japanese, but he looks white to me.”

“Hmm,” Snake brushes the man’s blonde hair off his forehead and tips his face to one side. “No, I see it. Besides, he’s about the right age - probably fathered by an American soldier. Wherever there’s an occupation, there will always be half-breeds looking for their place in the world. This man is a child of war, he belongs with us.” Snake chuckles to himself as he stands, “- and to think, I was going to cut his head off.”

His soldier gives him an unsteady look, half afraid. Still too new to have gotten used to the battlefield gallows humour. Snake dips down and hoists up the unconscious man, throws him over his back. “Go find the others and call the chopper. I’ll meet you at the RV.”

The soldier salutes. Before he leaves, he casts one more curious look at their prisoner. “What are you going to say to him when he wakes up?”

“Well, he’s a willful one,” Snake says, giving a hefty pat to the body slung over his shoulders. He laughs again, a genuine guffaw this time. “So, I suppose I’ll just have to scare the shit out of him.”

**[ME]**

_You don’t like to be touched._

_Touch is a knuckle dug in until it forms a bruise, a heel between the ribs, a fist that flattens the nose, hands that fold the arm back too far. You’re good at these things too. Better. The best. You never learned it, you always knew how to do it - the way to snap your elbow back and crack the teeth, the angle to kick a knee and make it crunch sideways, how to fit your first so nicely into the pocket of someone’s eye. It’s easy. It’s not even that you like doing it. It’s that it’s all there is. You don’t think about it, or about much else. You want them to put a gun in your hands. Take me away, you think, from this colourless world. The only colour you see is red._

_Next: you see yellow and blue. Your memory of this is only a half-day. All your memories before Her are like that: fragmented, dreamlike. You remember that someone important was visiting the camp, but at the time you didn’t care. You remember that you’d been shot in the arm three days earlier. You remember - you hadn’t allowed the medic near you, had removed the bullet yourself. It was a hack job, you’d never done anything like that before. Your wound was infected and your skin feverish; the doctor, he tried to pull you aside and rip off the dirty cloth you’d wrapped your arm with._

_You: grab his palm in one hand, his forearm in the other and twist his wrist until it snaps. You barrel into him head-first and when he’s on the ground, you silence his screams with a knife to his throat._

_She comes out of nowhere. An arm around your neck, your back against the dirt, that is your first memory of The Boss. You try to fight her, but she breaks your nose in one shot with the heel of her palm. You run at her and she uses her ankle to make you trip over yourself. Then she reaches out and wipes the blood off your cheek with her thumb, her other hand firm on your jaw._

_“Don’t waste your violence,” she says. “It’s a gift like any other. A writer does not fuss over their words in casual conversation. An artist does not create a masterpiece when painting their front door. That power you feel - the propensity for drawing blood... you must tame that in order to use it effectively. This was not an effective use of your talent.”_

_It’s like you’re hearing words for the first time in your life. The fading lines and chaos of your blurred world come into sharp focus and all of a sudden you are aware of yourself as a person, as a human being, as a man who has the potential to be something greater than what he is. Her thin hair and pale eyes are like a lion’s mane, like the sun - years later you cannot explain your devotion to her. All human languages are inadequate to explain what a dog feels when it first sees its Master._

You don’t like to be touched, not by soft hands. 

EVA’s palms are surprisingly calloused, but only in the space between her thumb and forefinger. That’s the only place where leather gloves cannot protect her from the rigours of consistent gun use. You’re surprised that Volgin never noticed that about her, but Volgin probably never touched her hands, probably never allowed her hands to touch him. There are rope burns on her wrist and, under that (years older), hand-cuff scars.

You feel like you and Volgin might have had something in common. The thought doesn’t disgust you as much as it should. When EVA reaches out to stroke your chest, you catch her arm and turn it around so you can examine her scars. She is uncomfortable - you’ve seen her more naked this this only hours ago, but she seems more exposed now.

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never done this before?” she laughs. “To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“I’ve done this before. Just… not like this.”

EVA’s eyes go soft. She puts her face close to yours, as close as you will allow. “Like what?”

Gently, you close your fingers around her other wrist. You place both her hands on your shoulders, showing her what you mean. You let her kiss you. 

_But afterward she… in the morning you -_

_You don’t like being -_

\- you only let Kaz touch you because it would be too much trouble to tell him no. He doesn’t listen most of the time anyway - a smart guy like him, his hearing is awfully _selective_. He’s always in your space, hooking fingers into your elbow to guide your attention, leaning over you when you’re hunched over to watch you clean your guns, his chin on your shoulder, strolling through camp with a companionable arm around your neck so that you and he can talk business in hushed tones. 

It takes you a while to figure out what he’s doing. You have to see him with a few women before the pattern becomes clear: _fingers light on the arm, walking just slightly too close, there’s a way he’ll sway closer - lower body first, arm goes behind the girl - that, when done to other people, looks obviously flirtatious._

You wait until he does something especially egregious to call him on it. You come home from a week-long mission flushing bandits out of the riverbank for a local Fishery, and Kaz immediately starts fussing about the new jobs, about the new volunteers - he wants you to look at a two-inch stack of paper and you haven’t slept in fourty-eight goddamn hours. The moment you sit down, however, his true intention becomes clear. _“Oh Boss, you work too hard. You’re all tense, come on-”_ he works you out of your shirt with the finesse of a used car salesman and begins giving you an - admittedly incredible - shoulder massage.

You tolerate this for exactly four minutes. That’s long enough for him to think he’s getting away with it. Then you say:“Kaz, are you trying to seduce me?”

His hands seize up and an embarrassed noise gets halfway up his throat before strangling itself. “Is it… is it really that obvious?”

“You tend to approach this sort of thing with a strategists eye, the same way you do battle tactics. It means that you have a particular method that can incredibly effective, but somewhat predictable.”

“I… _what_? You - hah, no, _of course_ you would put it that way.”

“Why don’t you just say it plainly, Kaz? Ask me directly.”

“Er… okay. If that’s what you want.” He clears his throat. “Hey Boss - wanna fuck?”

You push the chair back roughly. The wooden legs and the floor-boards screech against each other. When you turn to face him, Kaz looks like he’s having second thoughts. You catch him actually gauging the distance to the door. You’re not exactly desperate to go through with this, but you’ll be sincerely disappointed in him if he backs out now. You know he’s made of sterner stuff than that.

“Come on, _Master Miller_. Show me what you’ve got.”

The threat of a challenge pulls him back. He sighs, all fake nonchalance. “Well, you interrupted the first phase of my sales pitch. Not sure where to begin now.”

“You’ve got plenty of practice. Where do you _usually_ start?”

“Hmm,” he examines you over the top of his sunglasses. He approaches you and puts his hands sort of awkwardly on your hips. He seems confident that he knows what he’s doing, but you can tell that his palms are more accustomed to the way women’s hips often cinch in at the waist. You’ve personally never found much of a difference between women and men in this regard beyond the superficial. He dips in and places an exploratory kiss on your neck. You don’t pull away, so he places a second one on your jaw, then the corner of your mouth, then he kisses you proper. You don’t kiss back - maybe just to fuck with him, maybe because this kind of thing doesn’t come to you naturally.

Your lack of response sets him on edge. You can feel the tension in the way his grip on your sides loosens. “Oh, _shit_ ,” he grins, tries to make a joke of it. “Don’t tell me you’ve never done this before? I mean, it wouldn’t surprise m-”

You kiss him just to shut him up. Most of the time you kiss him, it’s to shut him up, or to quash some brewing discussion about the virtue of cost effectiveness vs real effectiveness. He becomes remarkably easier to manage this way. It’s not a terrible imposition on your time; you genuinely enjoy Kazuhira’s company. There is a reason that you went to such lengths to make him your comrade, there’s a reason that you’ll go to great lengths to keep him here. 

There’s a certain way that he… looks at you, sometimes. He can complete your dangling thoughts like he’s putting the correct punctuation on the end of a sentence. He susses meaning out of your ideas that you hadn’t quite materialized yet. When you described what the image of Pangea means to you, he understood immediately.

There are things about you, however, that you know he will never see. He-

_“Boss… Snake, I -” his arms twist in the cages of your hands and he makes a noise of frustration. “I appreciate that you’ve got this fetish, but I’m really, really good with my hands. Might want to let me use them once in awhile, huh?”_

_“A…” you don’t get it immediately. “A fetish? Kaz, that’s not it.”_

_He raises an eyebrow. “Isn’t it? You’re pretty damn consistent.”_

_“It’s not that. It’s just that I need to be in control.”_

_“Oh, I see how it is.”_

_You growl, not on purpose. Sometimes talking to him is like talking to a brick wall and you know he does it only to force truth out of you. “Not of_ you, _Kaz. There is always a chance that I’ll forget myself.”_

_That stuns him silent. His eyes pull wide and a brighter flush lights his cheeks. “Wow… th-that’s, uh…” he laughs breathlessly. “I mean, don’t worry about me so much in that case. I can take whatever you dish out.”_

_“Kaz… you don’t understand. I’m not talking about something physical, here. It’s deeper than that.”_

_He looks like he’s gearing up his courage. He closes his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath and says. “Snake. Show me, then.”_

_You let go of his wrists and gesture for him to stand up. The moment he’s on his feet you crack him in the jaw with your palm. While he’s reeling, you slam him into the wall with an elbow at the center of his chest cavity. Then you grab the two ends of his undone scarf, cross them over each other, and start to pull._

_“I don’t know the name of every bone in the human body, but sometimes that’s all I see when I look at someone.”_

_Kaz struggles to talk. Struggles to even breathe. “This… this is what gets you off, huh?”_

_“No,” you say._

_He’s doing quick calculations in his head, you can see them filtered through his eyes; processing that information, trying to figure out what it means. He doesn’t look at you any differently, though. You wait until he’s at his limit to loosen your grip on the scarf. He slides down the wall and tries his best to look dignified and cool while gasping for breath through dented air passages. The two of you stare at each other for a long time_ (the sound of rain hitting the roof, the flicker of the moonlight as it’s split by rattling blinds; there’s a storm brewing outside, but in here, nothing has changed).

 _When he can breathe steady again, Kaz starts laughing. “Jesus, Snake. Has anyone ever told you that you are seriously_ fucked up _?”_

The distance between you is this: there are things Kazuhira wants. Power, money, sex ( _you_ ). He wants the security and satisfaction and the sense of victory that those things bring.

“Want” means nothing to you. There is only one thing you need.

**[AND HIM]**

[ _Kaz, 1985 (January)_ ]

(the tape is damaged. after all, it is ten years old. the tapes here are all slightly warped, anyway, after the west armory caught fire in 1992.)

“ ---- uter Heaven. A nation unto itself. A Heaven for men like us.”

“You are so full of _shit_.”

“---az, you once said--------”

“Well I guess I used to be full of shit too.”

“Kaz-”

“You have no idea what I… you have _no fucking idea_ what I suffered for you!”

“Your wounded pride is talking, now. You made them pay, didn’t you? Everyone who ever wronged you. And even blinded by pain and revenge, you built it again - our dream. Bigger and stronger this time. You -----”

(silence, the slight shuffling of fabric.)

“But you’ve got a lot of nerve, Kazuhira Miller, holding a grudge over something so trivial as a little lie between business partners.”

(the clang of hollow metal against the floor. the sound of a fist hitting flesh. the ensuing scuffle sounds one-sided even on tape.)

“There it is! There’s the old fire!”

“Don’t mock me-”

“No, stay angry, Kaz. Stay angry at me if you have to. That’s the fire we’ll need for what I plan to do. Tha-----”

(the sounds of physical violence soften, turn to something else.) 

“Don’t. Don’t touch me. You make me sick. It’s worse than-”

“Worse than what?”

“F ---- ”

“--------ter than the real thing? That’s what you’re thinking, isn----?”

“ _Fuck you_.”

(sounds of struggle. something cracks; a joint being popped out of place.)

"Tell me that you want me to stop."

"I want... I want you to stop."

" _Kaz_ \- you'll have to lie better than that."

"I - I want you... to ---"

(the tape goes on for some time.)

Venom examines the tape closely, flips it over to make sure there’s nothing important on the back.

“Are you wondering why I’d keep something like that?”

Venom hadn’t heard him enter the room. His other self. Big Boss has a way of walking through the shadows in his blind spot, like a ghost. It’s easier for Venom this way, to remember who he is.

“Yes.”

Big Boss lights his cigar. The orange flame catches in the caverns of his wrinkles and makes him real, turning Venom into the Phantom once more. “You don’t wonder. You know. You are Big Boss - why would you keep a tape like this?”

_Of course you know_. Venom sets the tape down on his desk.

“To remind myself why I don’t have him killed.”

Big Boss nods and exhales a ribbon of blue smoke. “He spoke to you recently. What did he say?”

Venom will always respond swiftly and without conscious thought to Big Boss, like a whip being cracked. What he says immediately is: “You’re Big Boss - why ask, when you know the answer?”

The Boss chuckles. “Good answer. You’re right - I do know exactly what he said. I was there. But tell me - what do you think about what he said?”

“I think -”

_\- Kazuhira stops you in the hall with his cane. It’s strange to see him without his prosthetics these days, so there must be a reason for it. He’s very careful about how he presents himself, the kindly mentor who wears plain fatigues under his FOXHOUND coat; aging, but still handsome and hip - he keeps his blonde hair tied back in a loose ponytail and has never been caught on base in full dress uniform. He’s regained a bit of that practiced coolness from his youth, but the presentation is flimsy to your trained eye._

_With you, he attempts no pretense. “Off to play your role in the false war, dog?”_

_You address him politely. No reason to rise to his bait. “Good evening, Master Miller.”_

_“You’re awfully calm for a man facing his last hours. How many of our men from Diamond Dogs are stationed at Outer Heaven? Gonna drag them to hell with you?”_

_“You’re worried about them, but not your favourite student?”_

_“David won’t be killed by you.”_

_No, you think, he probably won’t be. You have plans for him - to free him from Zero’s sick system. Baptism in bullets and blood, the only true freedom left. “Whatever happens to him, he will find his true self in Outer Heaven. The time has nearly come, the first step in the revolution. There is still time for you to choose the correct side, Kazuhira.”_

_“Don’t give me his shit. Big Boss isn’t any different than Zero. A choice between chaos and control is just a choice about which hand to cut off, and since I’ve already lost one of those to this insane crusade, I might as well watch out for my own interests.”_

_“And what are your interests, Master Miller?”_

_He moves and slams the end of his cane against the wall, caging you in. He lowers his voice. “All those men and women you’ve recruited or rescued over the years. They think you’re a hero. You’ve been created to take the fall for a monster, but that isn’t who you have to be.”_

_“There is no such thing as a Hero. There is only a blank space in our minds that we fill with our own hopes and desires. When your hero crumbled, you filled that space with monsters and demons. Your inability to acknowledge this is what traps you here, Kazuhira, unwilling to come back, but incapable of walking away.”_

_“That kind of self-important analysis is really rich coming from a brainwashed puppet.”_

_“You call me a puppet from one side of your mouth but try to convince me that I’m a hero from the other. You’re usually more thorough than this.”_

_“A man who destroyed your life and your autonomy asks you to die in order to wipe the blood from his hands and you agree? That makes you a fucking puppet.”_

_“There is room for only one Big Boss.”_

_Kazuhira shakes his head almost in disbelief. He tsks, “and_ that’s _why I won’t call you a person.”_

_You grab his cane and twist - yank it and use the momentum to spin him around so that he’s the one caged against the wall now. Then you brace your prosthetic beside his head and lean over him. Years ago, this would have quickened his pulse. Now, he flattens his mouth and stares at you with carefully impassive eyes._

_“Would you call me a person if I killed him?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Is that really what you want, Kazuhira?_

_“To see him burn? There’s nothing I want more.”_

_“I have a chance. There is nothing special about him that makes him invincible. I know this better than anyone - he’s just a man. He holds my leash so tight that he might be surprised, at least for a moment, if I turned on him. That moment could be long enough for me to do what you’ve asked.”_

_“Would you actually do it?”_

_“Perhaps. You were my Commander once. It is in my nature to follow your orders as much as his. You won’t know if you don’t give the order. I might follow it.”_

_“Or you might kill me.”_

_“That is also true. I’d only be doing what he should have done years ago, that’s what you think, isn’t it? You wonder what it was that made him decide to keep you alive. It eats at you - ‘am I not worth it?’ If I killed him, or if I killed you, wouldn’t that mean that I’ve truly come to inhabit this skin? It would mean that I have surpassed him. It would make me the true Big Boss, the only one left. The legacy will be mine. And you - you would be free.”_

_“Is that really what you believe? That one man can replace another so easily? Is that how you’ve kept yourself sane?”_

_You don’t respond to that. Kazuhira will never understand, there is no point trying to explain it to him. You touch his face with both hands and brush your metal thumb over the flesh of his lower lip. “Kaz. Tell me what to do.”_

_Kazuhira inhales - a long, shaky breath. He’s thinking. It’s difficult to tell how tempted he really is, so effective is his shield of false indifference these days. You won’t know what your answer will be until he gives it to you._

_In the end, he says nothing. He breaks eye contact and turns his head. You run your fingers through his long hair and kiss him on the temple. You whisper: “I knew you didn’t have the heart to do it.” You knew that Kaz would never allow you to replace the original._

“It wasn’t anything important,” Venom says. Both hands are on his desk, his thumbs creating perfect 90 degree angles to frame the tape from 1985.

“If he’d given you the order, would you have considered following it?”

Venom stares out the window at the swaying palm trees that litter the interior of the barbed-wire fence in Outer Heaven’s lush courtyard. For a moment, his vision stutters and he’s seeing double: _a beach in Flordia, a picture of his grandfather’s hometown in China, the endless canopy of the Colombian rain forest. The sky as viewed with two eyes, his old hands holding a scalpel, his old hands shaking as he cut through the thread holding Paz’s wound shut… who is this man at his shoulder? Who is this man with the Devil’s horn and the false face? You’re so far away - from the girl with a Quiet voice, from Kazuhira’s hand on your face, from the last time you looked in the mirror and saw something smooth, unmarred, something that belonged to you. From the sky as viewed through two eyes, from your old hands..._

In the glass, he catches a hint of his reflection - the half of it that is a perfect mirror of Big Boss, unmarred by surgery scars or shrapnel. The sight drags him back from the brink. It stitches the wounded edges of his mind back together.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Interesting,” is all Big Boss says before leaving Venom alone to to play his role.

The distance, Venom thinks, between he and Kazuhira has always been this: Kaz never allowed himself the freedom of instinctive obedience. He would never understand the perfection and simplicity of what a dog feels when given a purpose by it’s Master.

Only through acceptance can one be free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Write something nice about VKaz for me to read," my roommate said to me. "With kissing."
> 
> @[tumblr](http://cephiedvariable.tumblr.com/post/131977901862/someone-stop-me-from-writing-metal-gear-fic) if you for some reason want to share this with your friends.  
> You can read a cut scene from this fic [HERE](http://cephiedvariable.tumblr.com/post/135013309014/bbkaz-fic-snippet-pw-era)!


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